Kafka Trial Analysis

The passage in which K. discusses his arrest with the guards is very important to understanding what the Law means in the context of Kafka’s The Trial. When analyzing the passage in question, one must understand from K’s point of view that he is very distressed at this moment about the lack of knowledge that the guards possess regarding the Law. The fact that they work for the courts yet know so little about it is an intriguing point to be considered. The guards largely have no answers for the things that K. is asking of them, simply stating that he is guilty because the Law itself is attracted to guilt. They are just “lowly employees” and implicitly believe that who they are arresting is guilty because it has been determined by “higher authorities”. They are simply disinterested with the why of his arrest and largely his guilt, affirming he is guilty among his protests of innocence. The notion that the Law itself is attracted by the guilty is strange to me. By saying that, he infers that in one way or another because K. is deemed guilty, he would end up arrested by the guards, his fate was determined the moment
This seems to make a lot of sense in the traditional sense of law, but in Kafka’s Law that is not the case. To the guards, K.’s lack of knowledge affirms their right to arrest him. His lack of knowledge of the Law is proof in their eyes that he has no ground to stand on when claiming innocence; it is interesting that they don’t offer an explanation as to what made him guilty. It reminds me of something you often hear regarding a bureaucracy in which only pertinent information is handed down to the “lowly employees” at the bottom and everything else is “above their pay-grade”. The court in this way seems more like a separate governmental entity rather than a judicial body, which would be expected when comparing it to contemporary